Well, I have done a few, but the one that sticks in my minds the most is almost drowning while rafting the Skykomish in high water.

My cell phone....thankfully.



Several years ago I was sitting at a stop light and just as I was about to go I dropped my phone. I stopped, reached down and grabbed it only to see a Sysco foods semi truck blow the red light and speed through the intersection.

Woulda been toast.

My ex when she was driving my truck this one time.

Rolled a 65 Mustang about 7 times at a little over 100 m.p.h. at S.I.R over 40years ago. Wasn't my car. Belonged to my girlfriend's brother. He was deployed in the Navy at the time. Walked away from it in better shape than the car.

Been lit up with high voltage electricity more than once and should have croaked.

I've had 2 small plane engines crap out on me and had to deadstick out in the boonies. Not stupid, just unlucky. Good landings but one was pretty dicey. One plane got wrecked when the truck they put it on rolled down the mountain when they were taking it out!

I set myself or something on fire damn near every time I do any welding.

#DrinkingWithTrautSaferThanPlaying

I decided to leave the womb and get spinal meningitis.

I wouldn't know where to start, too many times to even count.

A lot of things.

Not really stupid though, just comes with the job. Training accidents rank the highest on my list and have almost killed me at a faster clip than time overseas.

T-boned by a Stryker in a soft-skin M998 HMMWV was a fun one. 1 foot more over to the left in our lane and my face would have eaten the R/F corner of the Stryker.

Almost being shot, by our own Soldiers, at various training ranges. The best was this one time a 3 round burst went over my head and through the tail light and fuel can bracket of a 10k generator trailer. If I had been kneeling, or crouching vs. in the prone (like we were trained to do) I would have received 3 rounds on M855 in my back at less than 20 feet.

Couple weeks back I almost imitated the Bigfoot monster truck as I was driving down Pacific in Spanaway. Car cut across the lane and wipped around at the side street to enter my lane. His front end jutted out way over the white line and into my lane. I had 2 seconds to react...it was that quick. I jammed the steering wheel left and swerved around him. The Jeep to my left swerved as well. It was a lowered, beat up Civic, I would have launched off and over the hood of that shitbox in my truck pretty harshly if I had hit it. Dunno if death would have resulted, but it would have really sucked.

As said above, way too many to list.

In 2003 I was riding my snowmobile above Cle Elum, always trying to squeak an extra day out before the snow melted.
Was cruising along and the snow gave way, sled fell 2/3 of the way into a hole.
20 feet down was a rushing river.
Buddy helped me pull it out, but i could have easily fallen in. No telling where my body would have ended up.
Hard to judge where you are when the entire area is covered in snow.

Back in the early 70's, I found a CO2 cartridge that was cast iron instead of the usual aluminum. Threw it on the ground to make it explode. Later that night I discovered I had a gash in my neck from the shrapnel. An inch difference in trajectory would have killed me.

Ditto this one. Sky. I was "light ended" launched I dunno......a long way.........in clear air...........flying. Friends said it was amazing........but shit land in a nasty swirling pool. By the grace of God got out with a black eye and bruises. Stupid in the end.

Cars and close calls, yep. Stupid.

All the rest involve chemicals and rapid oxidation. Although this one time I poured an extremely strong reducing agent into a barrel of mixed organic chemical residue and acids. Wow. The barrel actually poofed out then chugged like a steam engine through the bung hole. I thought she was gonna blow. Not sure why I stood and watched. Stupid.

I have also been to places where they steal your kidney(s). All organs intact. Stupid though.

Don't know how much danger there was, but in 6th grade I drilled out the cylinder to a blank gun and tried to fire .22 LR rounds out of it.
Plastic hammer, so they didn't go off.
So we would put them in a vice and hit them with a hammer.
Got a piece of shrapnel in my arm.

Also used to play stove chicken.
Would have a party at my cabin, put a shell on the electric range, turn it to high, and see who could stand there in front of it the longest.

Rapid oxidation, know a bit about that.
I used to be a licensed pyrotechnist and PGI member.
If you think alcohol and driving don't mix, you should see alcohol, parties, and explosives or commercial grade fireworks.
Had a couple close calls.

Lets just say, I know about what it would take to blow the lid off a dumpster and propel it half a block down the street and have it stick in the side of a building. In theory of course. I mean, who would actually do that? Hahaha
Finally had a road to Damascus moment and disposed of everything before something really bad happened.
Gave it up and found other hobbies. Didn't even light off anything last night.

We used to take the spent Co2 cartridges from our BB wars, cut off the nipples, and fill them with gunpowder (dad used to reload shotgun shells), tape a dowel to them and make bottle rockets when I was a teen.

One time, I decided to fill one with the white powder that came from some fireworks I had purchased.
We wrapped it in duct tape, taped the fuse end of a split Black Jack firecracker in as the fuse, lit it and tossed it. I had ducked behind a tree before it went "BOOOOOOOM!". On the other side of the tree where I was standing was a 2" shard from the cylinder embedded about an inch into the tree right where my head would be.


Also, when I was in HS, a buddy of mine and I took our skateboards and fastened boards to them and used them as luge sleds to go down Cirque Drive between 67th and Orchard in University Place the summer before it opened. Our only brakes were chunks of 2x4 we had carved to hold onto and press into the pavement to slow down.
On one run, I went down hugging the right side. Towards the bottom, I clipped an open drain and lost my board. Lots of road rash, but nothing worse.

To be completely honest, I'm surprised I survived my adolescence as relatively unscathed as I did.

Fireworks, oh yeah. As a kid, I lived in Taiwan for a few years. There were fireworks factories all around our house. For a Yankee dollar, they would give you about 5 grocery sacks full of munitions. No labels on any of it. All mega powerful stuff, mostly M-100 and above level. Industrial quality ordinance. I think some of it was actual dynamite. You had to use a pretty large firecracker to even detonate some of the stuff. They would leave about a 3 foot crater in the lawn

Magnesium flares that would literally blind you if you stared at them very long. Rockets that would cave in the quarter panel on '60's auto steel. As an added bonus, most of the stuff would blow up underwater!

The true near death experience from all of this mayhem was getting caught by your parents. That only happened to me about twice a week. I guess I am truly lucky to still be alive!

A co-worker of mine met at a motorcycle dirt course after work. We decided to race the course, but it was really too narrow to race side-by-side, so we decided to time each other. Nothing like a stopwatch to trigger the adrenaline.

Anyway, when it was my turn, I hit this jump off of a big hill, and thought "That's faster than I've hit that before." (54 mph) It's a big steep hill down, so you're weightless for a few hundred feet. When I landed, the front wheel hit a rut and tossed me. The first thing to hit the dirt was my chin (no helmet). As I was flying through the air I had that "time slows down" effect, and I was thinking "I hope the bike doesn't land on me".

Neck was okay, bruised or broke a few ribs, couldn't breath in without pain for a few weeks. Stupid teenage crap, but survived to tell the tale.

The most memorable part of the accident, was the look on my friend's face when he found me. His eyes were like saucers - he thought I was dead.